Tired of checking AWS costs daily. Is this SaaS idea valid? | Hacker News Reader

Tired of checking AWS costs daily. Is this SaaS idea valid?

billping.com

3 pointsbval5 comments

Hi HN,

I work as a Cloud Architect in a consulting firm. I spend my days optimising enterprise cloud environments, yet ironically, I struggle to manage costs for my own side projects and lab accounts. I am looking for feedback on a "painkiller" SaaS idea called Billping.

The Problem I find myself logging into the AWS Console every morning just to check if my bill is trending normally. It’s "Console Fatigue."

I know AWS has native tools, but they have gaps for indie hackers and small businesses:

1. AWS Budgets are reactive: They usually alert you only after you cross a threshold (e.g., "You spent > $50"). 2. Lack of Velocity: Native alerts rarely say, "Your spend is low, but your daily growth rate just doubled." 3. Enterprise Complexity: Tools like Apptio or CloudHealth are overkill and too expensive for a $100/mo account.

The Solution I want to build a simple wrapper around the cloud API's that focuses on peace of mind.

- No complex dashboards. - Daily/Weekly digests sent to email (or Slack).

The Validation I threw together a landing page to explain the concept better and see if others share this pain: https://www.billping.com

My Question to You: Is this a real problem for you, or do you just rely on the Free Tier alerts? Would you pay a small monthly fee to never have to check the Billing Console again?

Thanks for the feedback.

I would never allow you to connect to my cloud account, but it’s an interesting idea. An SMS or Slack channel bot would be my preference over email.

My idea was to use an IAM role with readonly access to the cost explorer only. The end user has control of the permission on the IAM role. I can assume this role using the operator account and using an external id. This is what AWS recommends: https://docs.aws.amazon.com/IAM/latest/UserGuide/id_roles_co...

I thought about sms but included in the roadmap telegram and slack.

At $WORK-1 we had to log into the console almost every day as part of our normal daily operations anyway. However I rarely log into my personal AWS account console, the bill is 70-80cts/mo (mostly S3 storage fees, pretty stable over time).

If I were hosting something subject to potential egress overconsumption, it’d be interested I guess

At my work we only use console for troubleshooting as everything is automated using terraform. I pitched the idea to my manager he mentioned a slack message would be good as we have the accounts separated by team, so each team would get a notification on their slack channel as they are responsible and have budget. Thanks for the feedback.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com